Crikey, there’s a new Steam then. Valve explains that “in the last 12 months Steam has grown 200%. There are now 25 million users, 1000+ games, 12 billion player minutes per month, and 75 billion Steam client minutes per month.” Which means they need a newer, fresher Steam.

The opt-in beta is apparently now open. Except that it currently won’t let me onto it. Which is annoying. It seems that it takes a few minutes to wake up after a client update. I have to learn patience. To get complete details of the changes, head here. And if you’ve got Steam running then clicking here should open up the options to get you into the beta. Lots more information below.

It’s a complete overhaul. All new UI, new code, new everything. So here’s a few highlights.

There’s to be a greater emphasis on the social networking side of things, as you might expect. Or as I like to think of it, ways of spying on your buddies.

“Right from within your own game Library, you can now track which of your friends plays each game or invite them to play one with you. Before you’ve even bought a game, knowing whether your friends play it is one of the most useful pieces of information to have. So on the store homepage, there’s a new listing of what your friends have bought or played lately.”

There’s a new news feed, bringing info on the games they sell, both from inside and outside Valve. And a new way to organise achievements, because apparently people care about the bloody things.

I’m very pleased to see there’s a way of organising your game library. If you’ve been buying giant bundles during the holiday sales, you probably are too.

Certainly one of the highlights about the redesign is the shedding of Internet Explorer. It always bewildered me that this most crusty of browsers underpinned it all. Now it’s using WebKit-based rendering magic, which should hopefully speed everything up a deal.

Sweet. I had to update the Steam client before I could get onto the beta, but I’ve got it now. Looks brilliant, webkit is a definite improvement. The new library is fantastic. All round excellence, even the grayer tray icon fits better with my theme :D

This was my first thought when I read about it too. And then i loaded it, and noticed the more Mac-like control corners, and the “File” menu becoming “Steam” and other nice touches and I got very excited indeed. Seriously, Valve, please.

Quite a lot of the games on Steam have Mac versions. A good few of the indie titles (World of Goo, Braid) and the EA ones (Dragon Age: Origins), for example. I’d hope that buying a game on one platform would give me access to both versions. That would effectively make Steam the platform rather than Windows, and it could redefine PC gaming. I really hope they do it.

Hrm. I like it, but man, the cool visual panels in the library make my non-steam games I’ve added to steam look INCREDIBLY ghetto. There should be a way to upload images for those panels. I’d be the loser who bothered to make something for those.

Deuteronomy, you don’t “install” WebKit — it gets bundled into what app is using it, and this allows Steam to be a bit more nimble in that they can update their WebKit use more frequently than if they were using the IE widget they previously were.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who was excited by this. I feel incredibly geeky that WebKit is my favourite rendering engine because A) It means I have a favourite rendering engine B) It actually differs from my favourite browser (Opera).

Mmmmmmmmmm. This is nice, cleaner and faster. I like the way screenshots and videos are displayed on the store game pages. Though I’d still like to be able to collapse my window down in to a thin list of games I can double-click on… can I do that somehow?

Steam Friends & Community services were down for past 12 hours but I haven’t seen the new look yet. Since it was impossible to play MW2 & L4D without community connection, I hope the new look is worth it.

Now using a WebKit based rendering engine for the client and in-game overlay web browsing components (replacing Internet Explorer)

*Cries with sweet, sweet happyness*

Likewise. Also, favourite servers are now stored in the cloud, like your Friends – brilliant for me, as my favourite servers are consistently the only thing I forget to back up before formatting my PC. >.<

A bug related to the default settings of Windows. Unless you use proxies, go to Settings -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings and clear the “Automatically configure” checkbox (I forget the exact text offhand). I had the same issue, but clearing that tick box greatly sped up the rate at which the default view loaded the background info and allowed the other views to load (although those have crash bugs…)

The moment I saw this, I was thinking “Please let them have ditched IE, please let them have ditched IE”, and read all through the list of features and was like, yes, but…have you ditched IE? And then, at the very bottom? Joy.

You’re correct that, on the PC, there were no achievements for HL2 and Ep 1, even after Ep 2 launched. IIRC, the Xbox 360 version of the Orange box DID have achievements for HL2 and Ep 1 included, perhaps they finally got around to porting them over?

I haven’t explored it much yet, but any issues it does have are instantly forgiven from me simply because it has somehow fixed an issue that’s made Hammer completely unusable to me for the last couple of months.

update: i restarted steam and tried to play TF2 and it installed the latest (small) update and then worked. I then tried to play mw2 MP and it started at 4.5gb/11gb downloaded (Even though it started at 0gb when i first opened steam) however the free size of my C: drive went up so it definitely deleted something.

Installed it, looked at the new library and changed back. The large icons make finding the game you want a scroll fest, and non steam games have really bad icons. They seem to have ditched the small icons which were perfect, and now you can’t have favorites and non favorites on the same page, you have to select from a dropdown which one you want.

It’s also a lot more bloated, there is space everywhere which doesn’t need to be there (when you click on a game the actual information starts half way down the page, not to mention the IM windows).

Other changes seem good but the library is what 90% of the time I’m on and for me it’s a downgrade.

Several problems though:
– Could use a little more polish that typical Windows applications use
– Why can’t I freakin’ run media with something OTHER than WMP?
– The minimum width of the thing is huge.
– Make the scroll-y thing a little faster. It’ll feel more slick, more attentive.

And others! Stay tuned when I’m off my arse to write about it.

Also, I’ve got both CoH and TF2 and they aren’t downloading like you folks. Weird. Seriously, sometimes, computers just make me go “wut”, because not everyone has the same problem…I guess I’m fortunate though, I tend to not have problems.

Crashes on startup, no fix available yet but they are probably working on it (yes, I deleted steam.dll, clientregistry.blob etc., they don’t work).

What worries me is the font I see in those screenshots. Seems like it’s even more blurry/clearfonted/whatever you want to call it, than before? Pixel perfect font is in my opinion the only way to go but seems more and more people prefer blurring fonts in their software so I guess I’m once again in the minority with my opinion.. heck, it get harder and harder with every new Windows to get the real pixel perfect font back but at least Windows 7 still partially supports it. Most software don’t support it anymore and it saddens me very much.

And no you can’t fix it by going to list mode : Before, you could one-click-favourite games, seperating them from the others neatly. Now the icons are massive and you can’t seperate faves/nonfaves/uninstalled games while still displaying all of them. It takes forever to find what game you want!

Before, you could one-click-favourite games, seperating them from the others neatly. Now the icons are massive and you can’t seperate faves/nonfaves/uninstalled games while still displaying all of them. It takes forever to find what game you want!

I APOLOGISE FOR MY HONEST COMMENT. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

EDIT: Turns out you can use the old way: Go to list mode, click the “+” top right corner to turn off images. Hover over where add to favourites should be, and it appears. Also, right click games to add to new categories. Viva la new!

I agree completely with the list issue. Sure, the new stuff is pretty, but I found it much harder to set up to get to the games I want to play most while still having information on the screen about the games I COULD install/play/whatever. Some sort of nod to split panes or multiple list boxes, or something would be appreciated.

Also, while pretty, its a little… large right now… on a 1920×1200 monitor it seems to want a lot of real estate to display very little information.

People wanting old list view functionality should bear in mind that like all sensible lists, it can be sorted by clicking on the ‘list titles’ (‘Games’, the favourite star, the cloud for steam cloud support, etc etc.). With proper categorisation finding the games you want to play should never be easier with the additional bonus that you may even accidentally rediscover games you own but haven’t played in a while or installed.

Updated. It has broken my steam installation. Tries to update and fails. Tried to uninstall and reinstall: fails. Tried to delete all files in C:program files/steam and cleaned the registry. Still fails, says there is an existing exe/need administrator permission. Now I find there is a steam rar file in the steam directory which it wont let me delete, saying I need administrator permission.

My word, no more IE dependence, opens links in the correct browser, orders of magnitude faster response and it’s feckin gorgeous. Very well done valve you have finally eliminated all the little client things I despised about Steam.

Offline mode is working for every game I’ve thrown at it, including ones that definitely didn’t work beforehand. Notably even GfWL enabled games (Street Fighter 4) and Steam Cloud enabled games (Torchlight) seem to work fine. I was even able to run Left 4 Dead. You may indeed have one less thing to worry about, Vinraith!

That games that would never work in offline before are working now is very encouraging. However, obviously you just updated, and most games work right after an update. The question is, given a bit of time, will they still work?